Printed Matter — Warren Neidich

Date/Time: 18/12/2003 12:00 am

Warren Neidich launches his new book, Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, on Thursday, December 18.
Printed Matter, Inc. is very pleased announce a book launch for Warren Neidich’s Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, to take place at Printed Matter on Thursday, December 18 from 6-8PM. The author will be present to sign copies of his book. Printed Matter is located at 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues.
In Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, the artist and theorist Warren Neidich has formulated a hypothesis linking the development of culture to the development of the brain. In five different essays he shows that art has much to contribute to the investigation of the brain – not so much as a way to understand the neurophysiologic aspects of perception, but rather as a way to understand how culture itself “sculpts” the configuration and reconfiguration of the neurobiologic architecture of the brain. It is this reconfigured system of connections that ultimately leads to new ways of thinking that result in the production of new forms of artwork: “New network relations in the world configure network relations in the brain.”
Here is what others have already said about the book:
“It does not often happen that one encounters a set of texts and artworks that propose a different and wholly original paradigm for thinking through cultural history and the philosophy of the human subject. But that is exactly the challenge and pleasure offered by the essays and images by Warren Neidich that are collected here.”
– Norman Bryson, Chair of the History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
“Neidich offers not only a daring integration of the emerging biology of perception, but also a vision of aesthetic enterprise in which our neural life surfaces as a new, and arguably ultimate, site of social and political struggle. ”
– Sanford Kwinter, co-founder Zone Books and author of Architectures of Time.
“Both artists and scientists rely on multiple renderings of the visible and invisible worlds. In a continuation of Gyorgy Kepes’ Vision and Value series, Blow-up investigates the complex interfaces between these two disciplines that are essential to many of their most important breakthroughs.”
– Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curator of Musée d’ Art Moderne de la Ville de la Paris.
Warren Neidich is an artist who works and lives in New York City and London. He is currently visiting artist at Goldsmiths College, London, and The Cooper Union for Art and Science, New York City, and is a recent recipient of the British Council’s ACE-AHRB Arts and Science Research Fellowship. Future scheduled exhibits include the Edward Mitterand Gallery, Paris, Bureau Freidrich, Berlin, and the Kunstverein Brandenburg, Potsdam. Silence, a project he collaborated on with Elena Bajo, was one of four projects chosen for the Madrid Abierto Public Art Competition scheduled to open February, 2004. He is co-founder with Nathalie Anglés of artbrain.org, a web site that concerns the relationship between art and the brain.